That was an interesting article to read. I have many fond memories of the very early days of Freshmeat and my introduction to OSS and Linux. Freshmeat helped people share their products and was a great place to find new and upcoming projects to check out or even help on.
I feel like the late 90s was such a Wild West time for Linux. Linux is in a great spot now, best it has ever been, but for whatever reason the community just feels incredibly different for me now. It's probably just me aging.
There was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple blogging engine.
You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different. The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.
I feel like the late 90s was such a Wild West time for Linux. Linux is in a great spot now, best it has ever been, but for whatever reason the community just feels incredibly different for me now. It's probably just me aging.